Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman Douglas

Domestic ambition gets skewered here with a single switch of metaphors: the “home” that a man imagines as a private sanctuary turns out to be a “tavern,” a semi-public space where other people’s appetites set the schedule. Douglas isn’t just cracking wise about entertaining. He’s diagnosing a familiar self-deception: the fantasy of control and legacy (“to found a home”) collapsing into unpaid hospitality, social performance, and a kind of cheerful servitude.

The line works because it flatters and indicts at once. “Many a man” universalizes the trap, inviting recognition, while “thinks” quietly suggests ego and delusion. “Found” carries patriarchal heft - the house as monument, the man as builder of order. Then Douglas punctures it with “merely opened,” an image of doors swinging outward, boundaries dissolving. A tavern is where the proprietor provides, the patrons consume, and the atmosphere depends on keeping others pleased. The joke lands because it’s not really about friends being awful; it’s about the host’s complicity, the craving to be liked translated into square footage.

In Douglas’s era - late Victorian into early modern Europe, with its rituals of calling, salons, and gendered domestic roles - the home often functioned as a stage for status. His travel writing and worldly skepticism lean toward exposing how “civilized” life smuggles in obligation under the banner of comfort. The subtext is a warning: if you don’t decide what your home is for, your social circle will.